Cecily hesitated, then sighed rather wearily. “Oh, I don’t know. I thought not—but—I don’t know. He’s made me despise him; he’s robbed me of every illusion about him; I see him, and have long seen him—just as he is. Now he has insulted me in a way that’s so ludicrously unjust that I——” She laughed again. “That’s all one can do—laugh. And yet——” She stopped.
“Yes?” said Rose again.
“Yet I feel bound to him,” declared Cecily, slowly. “Not in any sort of legal way, of course, but just so that I can’t help myself. When he looks tired, or worried, or disappointed—and he so often looks all of them—my heart aches. I want to comfort him. It’s just as though he were my child, you know, my silly, naughty little boy.” She smiled to herself, quietly.
“Cis!” exclaimed Rose, involuntarily. “How you have grown up!”
“Grown up? I have grown old. Hundreds of years old.” The last words were uttered as though to herself. For some time neither of them spoke.
“What are you going to do about Dick?” asked Rose at last.
Cecily turned her head in surprise. “Do about him?”
“People are talking, you know. I heard it last year when I was in town, and, indirectly, once or twice since.”
“Are you thinking of Robert?” There was a note of contemptuous amusement in her voice.
“Not at all. Of you.”